Editing Techniques

Labelling tapes is a practice that must be followed when making a film for the sake of organisation. if a tape is not labelled then it is very possible that a tape could be lost among others due to there being no indication of what is on the tape. A tape should always be labelled to ensure the safety of footage so that none of it is lost.

The software I used to edit my film was Adobe CS6 Premiere Pro. This software can be used to edit films to a proffesional standard.
When editing I created "Bins" which are essentially folders that you can put your footage in. I organised my footage by putting them in these bins so that I knew where they were.
A serious issue I faced during editing is poor audio that was recorded during the shooting process. I tried my best to fix this with the tools Premiere Pro had available, but it wasn't completely fixable.
The vast majority of the video in Anaesthetic had no issues. There were occasional jumps and missing frames but nothing serious.
I think I could have done a better job while editing Anaesthetic. But even then there were many problems with the film that simply could not be fixed.

Social Action and Community Media

Social Action And Community Media

Social action and community media is created for a multitude of purposes to bring attention to a cause or issue that is local, national or global, to change attitudes towards issues, to raise awareness for issues, to challenge dominant representations and agendas, to create and strengthen community ties, to provide information, to campaign, to change voting behaviour, to infiltrate mainstream media and to encourage the viewer to take action.

An example of social action media could be the video that went viral in 2012 "Kony 2012" that was created by the charity "Invisible children". The actual intentions of the charity  are up for debate but the video was clearly a attempt to get the the audience to take some form of action to create change.

An example of community media is "The Loudest Whisper" movement that is taking place in stockton.

 



The Loudest Whisper was a community lash back against their representation current representation in the media. Stockton was recently featured in the show "Benefits Street" which painted the town as somewhere that was inhabited by people that just leeched off of the government. The people of Stockton-on-Tees didn't agree with this and decided to create their own media showing "The real stockton"
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The difference between these two different peices of media is one drew much more attention than the other. Kony 2012 became famous (or infamous) worldwide while the loudest whisper ironically didn't make much more noise than a whisper.
In my opinion what makes the difference between these two videos is that one of them had a huge amount of money behind it and the other did not, and that is why a vast majority of community media productions fail in reaching their goal, because small communites cannot compete with huge productions.

Unit 58: DVD Authoring

DVD's
Short for Digital Versatile Disc or Digital Video Disc, a DVD is compact disc able to store data, especially high-resolution audiovisual material such as movies. At the very most a Double sided, double layered DVD can hold a maximum of 17GB of data. DVD's can come in a few different forms such as:

+R
+R is a DVD that can be written and read. But once data has been put onto the +R DVD it cannot be erased and rewritten. This kind of DVD is commonly used for things as home movies as data on the disk can still be altered to an extent.

+RW
A +RW DVD is a disk that can have data written onto it and read. But if the user wanted to they could erase the data and rewrite new data onto the disk. This kind of disk is rarely used in the industry as the data can very easily be tampered with.

-R
This kind of disk is ideal for use in the industry as it can only be written once and after that it can only be read, making it much easy to protect copyright holders.

Blu-Ray
The Blu-ray disk was created to allow more space on a disk, therefore allowing the film itself to be less compressed. On a normal DVD the limitations of space on the disk force the creators to compress the film file, which causes the film to be lower quality. The Blu-ray does not have this problem and can play in HD 1080p.

 

ML
ML stands for multi layered. By adding a second layer of dye for data to be burned onto, the storage capacity of the DVD can be greatly increased.

Double Sided DVD's
A double sided DVD is a disk that uses both of its sides to store data, increasing the overall data capacity of the disk. sometimes these kinds of disk are used to store the film on one side and DVD extras on the other.

Writing Speeds
Writing speed simply refers to the speed at which data can be burned onto a disk. Almost all modern disk can support a writing speed of 5"2x". This means that data will be burned at 52x the minimum writing speed, which is 1,385,000 bytes per second.
Sometimes burning a disk at such a high speed can cause the data to be lower quality. Therefore some people opt to have disks written at 16x speed instead, to ensure high quality data.

Pre-Menu Conventions
After inserting the DVD, before the menu appears you will usually see a number of things. For example, trailers, anti piracy notices and disclaimers.

Trailers
Trailers are put on the DVD to advertise other films created by the same studio that created the film that you are watching. This usually only happens with blockbuster films from big movie studios such as Universal, 20th Century Fox, or Disney. Lower budget films will not usually have trailers.

Disclaimers
A disclaimer will usually just let the viewer know that the film does not represent the views of the film.

 

Anti_Piracy Notice

 

 An anti-piracy notice is an unskippable threat warning to the viewer. Reminding them of the possible repercussions of copying and distributing the film in violation of copyright laws.

 

In recent years DVD authoring has become more accessible to the general public, as software has been made available that is cheap enough for the average person to buy and use. Both Apple and Adobe have released Encore and iDVD; relatively cheap programmes for DVD authoring for the everyday consumer. For filmmakers with less funding, making a physical disk with their work on is no longer a lofty dream but a very easy to acquire reality.

Regional Codes
In different parts of the world DVDs carry different amounts of value. A person living in the United Kingdom may not pay the same amount of money as someone living in China or the US

There are 6 regional codes which are:

1. United States, Canada, Bermuda, Caribbean, US Territories.
2. Europe, Middle East, Japan, South Africa, Swaziland, Lesotho, Greenland, British Overseas Territories, British Crown Dependencies, French Overseas Department and Territories.
3. Southeast Asia, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau.
4. South America, Central America, Mexico, New Zealand, Australia, Papua New Guinea and a large proportion of Oceania.
5. Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Africa (Except, Egypt, South Africa, Swaziland, Lesotho) Central Asia, Mongolia, North Korea.
6. China.

DVD menus are often overlooked as a way to interest the audience through aesthetics and design a good example of this would be The Lord of the Rings menu.

The menu is stylised to fit the tone of the film. The menu appears with a slow zoom animation. The background has moving images of scenes from the movie, the buttons are in the shape of a ring in reference to the ring from the movie. Parts of the background has been made to look like parchment with a subtle smoke animation. The menu is covered top to bottom with references to the film. The amount of effort to incorporate the film into the menu design is very clear and it works very well as a positive advertisement for the film.

 

This menu on the other hand is much less inspired. There are no visual references to the film, apart from the scene buttons. If confronted by this menu you would not have any idea what kind of movie this would be. The background is a mishmash of greys and the buttons are clear presets. None of the scenes have names, only numbers. Overall there is an absolute lack of personality in this menu, making it very likely to discourage the viewer to watch the actual film.



Production Blog: The Road

01.05.2015
Today we went to my house to shoot the routine scenes 6, 8, 9 and 10. In which Zack goes about his boring everyday life. For this shoot we had a lot of time to play with and didn't need to rush any shots. I haven't worked with Sam on any projects before so today I was trying to figure out the best way to direct him. He worked very well with the direction I gave him. Isobel worked great on camera and was very helpful around set, giving good advice and criticisms of my ideas when she saw fit.

04.05.2015
Today we met up with our actors Jack and Sam outside of college at 6pm as planned. We then led them out to the location me and Isobel had scouted the week before. There were no weather problems, no wind, rain, or even sun to any extreme. The road was fairly quiet and only a few cars and one curious biker came by during shooting. We shot scenes 1, 2, 3, 6, 10 and 11. and everything went smoothly. This was the most we had planned to film in a short amount of time, luckily both Jack, Sam and Isobel were very flexible about how late they could film. With Jack on set Sam loosened up a little which made him a little easier to direct which made shots better. I feel much more confident about my film now that we have gotten the bulk of shooting out of the way. Heres a screen cap from the first shot.

13.05.2015
Today we met with Jack and Sam at college to reshoot the car scene as the original wasn't quite what I wanted. Unfortunately we only had an hour with Jack to film, so we had to rush to get things done. But despite this we managed to finish in time and come out with the footage we needed.

15.05.2015
Today was the hopefully the final day of shooting. We reshot some scenes of Sam going about his routine. Once again time was not short and we didn't have to rush. We added a few improvised shots onto the end since we still had time, which worked out great. I'm pretty confident I have everything I need.

Anti Smoking Production Blog

 

Anti Smoking Production Blog

03/03/2015
We began today forming the idea for what our film was going to be about. We sat down and talked about the ideas we had thought of seperately, and discussed which parts would and wouldn't work.
We eventually settled with a combination of mine and Alex's ideas.
The movie would be about The Grim Reaper as a personification of the negative effects of smoking being an everyday nuisance in a smokers life

04/03/2015
Today was mostly just getting paperwork out of the way so we could start filming as soon as possible. We plan to audition actors tomorrow for the part of the protagonist and the extras.

05/03/2015
Today we casted actors for the role. One of the actors we were going to audition was sick, so Jack got the part by default. I'm pretty confident in his ability, he should help make this film great.

10/03/2015
Today is the first day of shooting. Everything went according to plan. All actors and production crew turned up on time and were organised. Makeup artists did a fantastic job on Doms makeup. We actually managed to complete more scenes than expected, putting us ahead of schedule.

13/03/2015
Today is just preperation and organisation for a second and last day of shooting.

17/03/2015
Today was the second day of shooting. Things didn't start well today. One of our actors was late, another couldn't come in due to having to go to the hospital and our makeup artists had not come in without any explanation. After a while we managed to pull everything together and get a different makeup artist to help with the makeup. We quickly got back on schedule and shot everything we needed. Its onto editing now.

24/03/2015
The film is finished! The majority of the struggle in the post production of this fim was finding the right music. Eventually we came to a point where we would try anything to see if it worked. Eventually we settled with Mozart which I think added a lot of comedic value to the film. It doesn't fit perfectly to some parts of the film, but there are many parts where it matches up very well with the cuts.

 

 

Evaluation



To find out how effective our film was in deterring people from smoking. We created a survey to find out our viewers opinions.

From the respones we recieved it seems safe to say that A Grim Addiction was fairly effective in its delivery. I was somewhat dissapointed with the answers to question five, and if I were to do it over again perhaps I would have made the message more hard hitting for the audience.

Another issue I personally had with the final result is the choice of music. When we began the project we didn't have a peice of music in mind and therefore it wasn't created to fit with any particular track. In the end we settled with a peice by Mozart which worked well, but it wasn't perfect. Given another shot I'd probably stick with Mozart, but make the film to match the music.

Despite these issues I still think the film was a great success and I am very proud of the final product. I think we did a great job of translating jokes written on a peice of paper into a visual comedy, while still retaining a clear message to the audience.

A Grim Addiction

 

 

A GRIM ADDICTION

By

Luke Small

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

INT: CLASSROOM

Three people sit in a classroom, finishing up college work. Two of them get up and pat Dan on the shoulder, gesturing for him to come with them. Dan stands and goes with his friends out of the classroom.

INT: COLLEGE

Dan reaches the bottom of the stairs with his friends; he says something inaudible to them and gestures to the door. He breaks off from them and heads in the opposite direction.

EXT: COLLEGE SMOKING AREA

Dan Stops outside and puts a cigarette in his mouth, he pulls out his lighter and lights it. He takes a drag, and looks up only to be confronted by the grim reaper looking over his shoulder standing uncomfortably close. Dan stares back in disapproval.

INT: COLLEGE

Dan returns to class, the Grim Reaper annoyingly maintains his distance the entire journey back, already becoming a nuisance.  The grim reaper sits down with Dan, casually annoying people in the surrounding area. Dan starts to cough. The reaper takes interest and raises his scythe only to look disappointed when Dan stops.

INT: CAR

The reaper gets into the car with him and his friends, awkwardly squashed into the middle seat in the back.

EXT: FIELD

Dan plays a sport; all the while the Grim Reaper is riding on his back, making running very hard. Later the reaper gets off his back only to tackle him.

INT: RESTAURAUNT

Dan goes on a date with a girl to a nice restaurant. The Grim Reaper joins them, putting his feet up on the table and having generally poor table etiquette. When the bill comes for the food Dan opens his wallet to pay only for the reaper to rip any money there is out of it and in return throwing cigarettes at Dan.

INT: DOCTORS OFFICE

Dan is at the doctors and the doctor illustrates that smoking is dangerous, and then points out the grim reaper, and then the grim reaper knocks the papers out of the doctor’s hands.

EXT: FOOTPATH

Dan takes a walk in public, the grim reaper, is a general nuisance to those around.

 

INT: BEDROOM

Dan wakes up to a bright light, he looks around to see the grim reaper sitting next to him reading a book.

EXT: BRIDGE

Dan and the reaper stand side by side in unpleasant and cold weather conditions. Dan, cigarette in hand is shivering. The Grim Reaper is wearing a warm coat and colourful gloves over his robe.

INT:

Dan plays a civil game of chess with the Reaper, only to be checkmated. Dan loses his temper and flips the board.

INT: CINEMA

Dan sits in the cinema with his girlfriend and the Reaper, the reaper nudges him, gesturing he wants to go outside. Dan ignores him. The Reaper then tries to physically pull him out of his chair; Dan falls out of his chair and gets angry, getting into a fight with the reaper while people watch the movie. An audience member shushes Dan, a dismayed Dan is tackled to the ground by the reaper and dragged out of the door.

INT: College

Dan finally considers quitting. Picking up a leaflet from a stand and looking at it. The grim reaper stands in front of him, and slaps the leaflet out of his hand.

<Can you deal with this for the rest of your life?>

The Grim Reaper and Dan stare at each other for a moment. He slaps Dan in the face.

Motion Graphics idea generation

 

60’s motion graphics sequence ideas.

Entry 1.

Script

Hits: The history of pop

The 60’s is known most for the dramatic changes that took place in the decade. The 60s was a time of “out with the old in with the new”. The decade saw LGBT and civil rights appear in the public eye, British music was at an all-time high of popularity and musical icons of today experienced their first taste of fame.

Shooting to fame in 1962 with their first single “Love Me Do” that reached the number 17 spot on the UK charts. In 1964 The Beatles invented the first music videos with the premier of their film “Hard Day’s Night” at the height of their popularity.

In 1964 while the Beatles were conquering America, Bob Dylan released The Times They Are A-Changin’ a heavily opinionated album that was inspired by the Civil rights movement in America, increasing his notoriety of being a rising protest musician.

Meanwhile in England the Rolling Stones got their first booking outside London, As a result of the success of the single “Come On” which reached #21 on the UK singles chart, sharing the bill with The Hollies at a club in Middlesbrough, England. Soon after in 1964 their third single, a cover of Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away" is released and reached #3 on the American charts.

In 1969 the decade came to an end with a bang when the first Woodstock, one of the most popular music festivals in the history took place. It attracted an estimated 400,000 people that came to see huge performances from names like Jimi Hendrix, and The Who. Three days of harmony to represent the best of the “peace-and-love generation.”

Entry 2
 

I like the idea of using a fractal effect for my motion graphics intro, to capture the interest the 60's had in all things psychelic. I'm going for something along the lines of these examples.

 

 

 

I don't know how difficult it would be to animate one of these, or if it can even be done in after effects...

 

Entry 3 

After doing some research I discovered that a fractal can be animated quite eaily in motion graphics.

This is the technique I will use.